The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark 1:1The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That’s where we are today, right at the start of Mark’s Gospel, who will be our companion and “tour guide” through our journey with Jesus this new church year. And Mark wastes no time; he jumps right in – no genealogies, no angels, no shepherds, no Mary and Joseph and birth story. Mark takes us right to the heart of the matter, to the wilderness, that place where John – Jesus’ cousin – is proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Messiah, the One first century Jews called God’s Son.

John is in the wilderness, not just because he didn’t fit too well in polite society – not just because of his scruffy clothes and a very strange diet – but because that is where God’s People throughout history found renewal, found themselves face-to-face with God and unable to look away. The most important story in the whole Hebrew Bible (besides the story of Creation) is the story of the Passover and the Israelites’ long sojourn in the Sinai wilderness where they learned how to be the People of God as if their lives depended on it…. because they did.

John’s vocation was to call the people of his day to prepare, to get ready for the coming of the Messiah by being baptized. It was a re-enactment of their flight to freedom from slavery in Egypt through the Red Sea. And it was a wake-up call, cold water splashed in the face to get the attention of those who should have been waiting eagerly for the arrival of the Messiah, but instead were squabbling amongst themselves in a variety of ways, or seeing how best they could cut a deal with their Romans over-lords whose Emperor, Caesar, was increasingly claiming for himself the prerogatives and trappings of divinity.

John took a firm stand in the wilderness of Judea, probably ten miles from Jerusalem, calling the people to wake up, open their eyes, turn around (for that is what repentence means) and be baptized in the Jordan River as a symbol of a fresh start, a renewal of their Passover freedom, forgiveness for their separation from God – their sin. And Mark grounds his telling of John’s wilderness proclamation with references to the prophets Isaiah and Malachi: the voice of God’s messenger calling out in the wilderness or desert, and the message of making a straight and true road for the Lord – a clear path.

John did not seem to have a set idea about what the Messiah would look like, or who he would be. He just knew in his gut, in his bones, that the time was at hand, and that something profound was going to happen, that the Lord was going to do something new, and astonishing. The best John could say was that he himself was not worthy in the face of the One who was to come, and that with Messiah would come the fire of the Holy Spirit – just like the Israelites being led through the Sinai wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night – the signs of God’s presence.

And just off-stage, waiting in the wings, is Jesus – himself preparing to start his public ministry of announcing God’s Kingdom by first being baptized by John. It’s as though we are on tenterhooks waiting to see who this Messiah will be, what he will be like, how he will bring in God’s Kingdom. We’ll hear the rest of that story – but not for a while yet. We’ll have to wait until the First Sunday after Epiphany, and then hear it again (in part) on the First Sunday in Lent. For now, we are in Advent, and the new and astonishing thing that God is about to do is to come to us in the face and form of a tiny baby – a new and fragile human life. Astonishing – that the Creator and Power and Lord of the universe would deign to be born as a human being, would get down in the muck and the mire, and the pain and the sorrow, the grief and constraints of our earthly existence. But God knew that it was by taking on our life that we would ultimately be able to see for ourselves the love and compassion and goodness of God. By coming to us in the flesh, God enabled us to see him in the person of Jesus, and to see what we ourselves were meant to be.

Jesus came to show us God’s way – even though that way led through the Cross. When we look at Jesus we see God in ways we might miss if there had never been a Holy Birth, an Incarnation, God-with-skin-on. While Jesus’ public ministry – his teaching, and healing, and preaching, and proclamation, and wonder-working – was of the utmost importance, it would not have mattered in the same way if he had not been in himself and at the same time both fully God and fully Man, diving and human, both/and. When we look at Jesus, that is what we need to understand, to be seeing. When we look at the Baby in the manger, the Holy Child of Bethlehem, that is what we need to understand, to be seeing. There is no part of human existence that God was not willing to enter into, starting with the indignities of childbirth, and ending with the suffering of crucifixion and death. And all of it was done for our sake, to save us from ourselves – we who so often are our own worst enemy, both individually and as the human race. All was done for our sake, that we might know to the depths of our being the love and grace and healing of God.

So John the Baptist is standing here, perhaps right over by our baptismal font. He is pointing to Jesus; he is a sign post on the road pointing to Christ; he calls us to prepare ourselves for the new and astonishing thing God will bring to fruition. What preparations do you need to make? What are the signs you need to pay attention to? When you see a painting or a photograph or a Christmas card depicting Jesus’ birth do you see and sense the fire and the power of God’s Holy Spirit?

God came to us in Christ so that we might, in and through him, become filled with God’s life and power and Spirit, so that we might take our place as partners and servants and co-workers with God in the renewal of God’s Creation – the Earth and its peoples. As we prepare for the joy of Christmas, we also prepare to celebrate our own birth into God’s purpose and plan for us. As St. Athanasius of Alexandria said in the fourth century: “God became man that we might become god” – in other words, to share the life of the holy and undivided Trinity, one God, to participate with and in God, in this created world, in the way that Jesus showed us.

The Good News is here. Jesus has come to share our humanity and his Holy Spirit. Our redemption is at hand. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing! Amen.

Jesus said, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.” Mark 13:24b-26

Advent is here; our call to keep awake, to live in anticipation, to sleep with one eye open in readiness for the Savior’s appearing. And our readings and the collect of the day are full of images of darkness and light, human failure and sinfulness, our need to be shaped and formed by God. These apocalyptic images are stark, strange, born out of crises of their own times. It is from this sense of crisis that the ancient prayer of the Church arises: Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

This is the way we start our new Church year – calling out to God from the crises of our own lives and those of our world. This year we will (for the most part) be accompanied by the Gospel of Mark in our Sunday worship. Matthew’s Gospel, which we lived with for the past year, was focused on Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s traditions and the renewal of God’s People. Mark is the story of conflict – especially between Jesus and the “high priestly rulers and their Roman overlords” – with Jesus’ teaching, preaching, and enactment of the Kingdom of God as a new development in Israelite history. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the four, the most direct, and stripped down, as if he didn’t want to waste words when time was of the essence. Throughout the centuries, this Gospel has called Jesus’ followers to focus on the depth and quality of their discipleship: how are Christians to live in the conflict and tensions of their times that following Jesus leads them to?

Mark’s Gospel was written against the background of the crisis of the Jewish popular uprising against Rome and the military destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 a.d. Those events framed the way Mark remembered Jesus’ words and wove them together for Christians in that time and place. Chapter 13, from which our reading today comes, reaches back to imagery from Daniel, Ezekiel, and some of the writings found in the Apocrypha, to paint a picture of the coming of the Son of Man, the Messiah – once again just prior to Mark narrating the events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

This is, of course, a far cry from the music that has been playing in the malls and on the radio – and not just because the retail sector is rushing Christmas, and not allowing for reflection and preparation, so that by the time we get to December 25 we are sick and tired of secular Christmas. What we so often see around us, and are understandably drawn to focus on, is the joy of Christmas: the birth of a child, the announcement of peace and good will, the astonishment of the shepherds, the abundance of gifts from exotic travelers from the East. All of these are aspects of God’s Good News and signs of our redemption. But we do ourselves and the Gospel is disservice if we skip over the harder, darker parts of the story that Advent leads us through.

Remember that the Magi brought gold for a king, frankincense for God, and myrrh as an embalming ointment for death. Remember that the shepherds were both the dregs of their social structure and a reminder of God as shepherd of God’s People throughout Israel’s history. Remember that the angels’ song was to give glory to God who is the source of true peace and the common good – not Caesar, who tried to claim that role for himself. Remember that the baby was born to parents who were uprooted from their home, who then had to flee to a foreign country to escape the murderous reach of the king.

And the Child Himself, the Holy One born in Bethlehem? He was God incarnate, born to share our life, vulnerable and human, arrested, tried and convicted on false charges, nailed to a cross where – in the words of the King James translation: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6). And it is this same Lord who triumphed over sin and death in the Resurrection, returned to the realm we call heaven at the Ascension, and for whom we wait with eager longing at the end of this present age. This is the One we look for in hope – the sweetness, and the joy, and the suffering and sorrow, and triumph and expectation all held together, because that is the way God comes to us, that is the life Christ invites us to.

So in the midst of darkness – personal darkness, spiritual darkness, the darkness of winter, the darkness of our world – we wait for the Light of Christ. We light candles to symbolize that Light – on our Advent wreath, the candles we may put in our windows, candles we may light in times of prayer. And we pray, in the words of the Collect, that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light – the goodness, and kindness, and compassion, truth and love of God – so that we may live and walk in the fellowship and company of Christ, now in the time of this mortal life, and in the age to come. To God be the glory.